Daily Manna · Day 290 · October 17
Mercy as High as Heaven
“For as the heaven is high above the earth, so great is his mercy toward them that fear him.”
You cannot get to the top of the sky.
David looked up and saw what looked like a great dome over the earth. It was enormously high, and he probably pictured it ending somewhere. He measured God's mercy against it because it was the biggest thing he could point at. When we look up today, we know something that makes his picture different and his point even stronger: there is no ceiling at all. The distances in space are so huge that the numbers stop meaning anything once you say them out loud. Some of the starlight we see tonight left its star before anyone wrote a psalm. His picture of the sky and ours are not the same, and there is no sense pretending they are.
What stays the same is his method. He is saying more than that God's mercy is very big. He is choosing the one measurement that nobody can walk to the end of, in his world or in ours, and he is saying that God's mercy is like that. The next verse does it again from the side: "As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us." If you travel north, you eventually reach the pole and start heading south. But you can travel east for ever and never start heading west.
He ties this mercy to "them that fear him," and that is the part people usually hurry past. The fear he means takes God seriously enough to stop hiding and come to Him in the open. That is where a person finds out how far His mercy goes.
So stop for a moment, and do not turn this into a plan. Go outside if you can, and look up for a minute without saying anything. As high as all of that reaches, and higher, is His mercy toward those who fear Him.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 290 is Substance and Evidence (Hebrews 11:1).